The older I get the more I’ve noticed the power of opportunity cost. I think it’s the result of a few things:
I have more experience with the value of my time
I have greater urgency because I better understand my time to be productive is limited (barring big changes that will let me work longer)
I have enough training and experience to reasonable get more value from spending more time exploiting than exploring
I see the topic very much related to regret. Dealing with opportunity cost doesn’t bother me much, and I suppose that’s because I don’t live with regrets. I know that at each moment I did the best I could. If I could have done something else I would have. Counterfactuals aren’t real, per se: they’re things we use in our head to reason about causality. We only can and only will ever do one thing, and that thing will be the best thing (and the worst thing!) because if we could have done literally thing else we would have. So I just accept that I don’t exactly know what’s going to happen, but I’m here for the ride of whatever amazing stuff this person I am gets up to.
I can’t help but notice that if for you “nothing else could have happened than what happened”, then your definition of “could have happened” is so narrow as to become trivial.
Rather, I think that by “X could have happened in situation Y”, the laymen mean something like: even with the knowledge of hindsight, in a situation that looks identical to situation Y for the parameters that matter, I could not exclude X happening”.
The older I get the more I’ve noticed the power of opportunity cost. I think it’s the result of a few things:
I have more experience with the value of my time
I have greater urgency because I better understand my time to be productive is limited (barring big changes that will let me work longer)
I have enough training and experience to reasonable get more value from spending more time exploiting than exploring
I see the topic very much related to regret. Dealing with opportunity cost doesn’t bother me much, and I suppose that’s because I don’t live with regrets. I know that at each moment I did the best I could. If I could have done something else I would have. Counterfactuals aren’t real, per se: they’re things we use in our head to reason about causality. We only can and only will ever do one thing, and that thing will be the best thing (and the worst thing!) because if we could have done literally thing else we would have. So I just accept that I don’t exactly know what’s going to happen, but I’m here for the ride of whatever amazing stuff this person I am gets up to.
I can’t help but notice that if for you “nothing else could have happened than what happened”, then your definition of “could have happened” is so narrow as to become trivial.
Rather, I think that by “X could have happened in situation Y”, the laymen mean something like: even with the knowledge of hindsight, in a situation that looks identical to situation Y for the parameters that matter, I could not exclude X happening”.